Is teleportation possible at all?

by Beth Divine•27 Sep 2018

Teleportation, jet packs, and flying cars. These were the
promises made by shows like Tomorrow’s World in the 70s and 80s – we were going
to have teleportation, jet packs and flying cars. Flying cars exist, but they
cost far too much for them to be a regular sight in the skies, plus the immense
legislation surrounding small flying gadgets (think drones) has made a mockery
of the idea of flying traffic in any quantity… Jet packs, too, are real, but
again, the practicality of the invention is not wonderful. Jet packs are
intensely energy-inefficient, burning up gallons of fuel on relatively short
flights, they are hard to steer and as a means of transportation they are almost
the most impractical one there ever was!

The only one of the three that hasn’t been attempted at all
(until very, very recently!) is teleportation. And the recent experiments that
have been conducted have been performed on tiny, tiny quantities – literal
atoms. Now, unfortunately, what successes they have at this level may not
easily scale up, because of quantum entanglement and a number of other physical
absolutes.

Firstly, how teleportation would work: it is NOT possible to
break an object down into atoms or a data stream, transport it millions and
millions of miles in the blink of an eye, and then reconstitute that object in
the destination. Quantum entanglement requires there to be two entangled
particles, one in the original destination and the other at the target
destination. Once those are in place, information can be sent from one particle
to another about a third particle. The information about this third particle
can be used to make an identical replica in the secondary location.

Thus, it is not the object that is transmitted, what happens
is that a copy of the original is created in the other location. Sci-fi
television shows, like Dark Matter, have made use of this – with protagonists
creating body shells that can travel about and get killed without the character
dying. However, the shells must return to the transportation pod in order to
download their memories into the real body – the memory is then part of the
original person’s memory, as though they were the one who had travelled.

The second major reason why teleportation will not be
possible for many years is the sheer amount of data involved in teleporting
even the information for an atom or two – the computing power needed to stream
an entire human body does not currently exist at all…

Thirdly, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light.
But teleportation would require the information to travel in literal instants,
which is too fast for current physics laws.

Also, and finally, the act of transferring the information
of a particle destroys the entangled pair, separating them and thus, losing the
connection between them. So each instance of teleportation would be excessively
high in cost, resources and efforts – for not very much return on investment.

So any Star Trek dreams about being ‘beamed up’ or travelling across the
cosmos in the blink of an eye must be shelved once again – possibly never to be
taken out and admired in quite the same way again…